Comments by "SmallSpoonBrigade" (@SmallSpoonBrigade) on "Chinese is NOT picture writing! - History of Writing Systems #5 (Determinatives)" video.

I used to wonder about why they didn't do it and then I moved to China and started studying Mandarin. Trying to write any form of Chinese without the characters wouldn't work well. There's too many homophones in the language as a result of the small number of uniquely identifiable syllables for that to work. Perhaps Cantonese or some form with more tones might get away with that, but I doubt it.
19
+Beliserius1 , that's because it makes no sense to do so. Chinese has a ridiculous number of words that share the same syllable. Ditching the characters would require people to write more words in order to hope that the meaning is conveyed. There's a reason why the oral way of communicating things is almost always longer than the written way. You need the extra syllables in order to determine the meaning amongst identically pronounced words.
13
FWIW as an American trying to learn to read Chinese, the simplified characters aren't much help. At best the simplification makes it easier to hand-write the characters, but the written Chinese I saw while in China was itself simplified by the people doing the writing. I assume the same thing happens with traditional characters. The unfortunate side effect is that some of the characters are actually less simple in the simplified character set than in the traditional one. And to add insult to injury, the combination of only partially related words makes for more confusion. Not to mention that the simplified characters are harder to memorize than the traditional ones are where more of the meaning is preserved. I started learning the simplified characters so I'm going to stick with that until I can read the newspaper at least. But, eventually I'll probably learn the traditional characters as well.
5
That's not what spay means, spay only applies to female animals. You can spay a female cat, but you'd neuter a male dog.
1